Advertisements are a part of daily life and certainly an important part of entertainment programming, where the payments for advertisements cover the cost of network television. Manufacturers pay an extremely high price to present, in 30 seconds or less, an advertisement for their product which they hope a consumer will watch. Unfortunately for the manufacturer, the consumer frequently uses that interval of time to check the programming being presented on the other channels, and may not watch any of the advertisement. Alternately, the consumer may mute the channel and ignore what the manufacturer has presented. In any case the probability that the consumer has watched the advertisement is quite low. It is not until millions of dollars have been spent on an advertising campaign that a manufacturer can determine that the ads have been effective. This is presently accomplished by monitoring sales of the product.
With the advent of the Internet manufacturers and service providers have found ways to selectively insert their advertisements based on a subscriber's requests for information. As an example, an individual who searches for “cars” on the Internet may see an advertisement for a particular type of car. Nevertheless, unless the subscriber actually goes to the advertised web site, there is no way to determine if the advertisement has been watched. As the content on the Internet migrates to multimedia programming including audio and video, the costs for the advertising will increase, but unless the advertiser can be sure that a significant percentage of the message was watched or observed, the advertising is ineffective.
Cable television service providers have typically provided one-way broadcast services but now offer high-speed data services and can combine traditional analog broadcasts with digital broadcasts and access to Internet web sites. Telephone companies can offer digital data and video programming on a switched basis over digital subscriber line technology. Although the subscriber may only be presented with one channel at a time, channel change requests are instantaneously transmitted to centralized switching equipment and the subscriber can access the programming in a broadcast-like manner. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer Internet access and can offer access to text, audio, and video programming which can also be delivered in a broadcast-like manner in which the subscriber selects “channels” containing programming of interest. Such channels may be offered as part of a video programming service or within a data service and can be presented within an Internet browser.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a need for an advertisement monitoring system which can monitor which advertisements have been viewed by a subscriber.